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Orson Welles, Volume 2:
Hello Americans
(Viking, 444 pages, $32.95)
By Simon Callow
hatever happened to Orson Welles after Citizen Kane? That is the compelling question that Simon Callow, in this follow-up to the first volume of his highly acclaimed Welles biography, The Road to Xanadu, attempts to answer. Callow, a British actor, director and writer who has appeared in films such as Four Weddings and a Funeral and Shakespeare in Love, took ten years writing this book and the lengthy gestation pays off. Spanning the years 1941-1947, the book is a riveting portrait of a larger-than-life man during a time of monumental historical importance. Beginning at the height of Welles’ success following the glittering premiere of his controversial masterpiece, the story tracks his singularly strange career crash-and-burn over the next several years. A man with both a prodigious ego and a powerful social conscience, Welles is vividly brought to life in all of his contradictory splendor. Shortly after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Welles was enlisted by the U.S. government to make a documentary about the Carnival in Rio de Janeiro–a film designed to strengthen our relations with Latin America at a time when we were intent on building allies. The unfinished documentary, It’s All True, would prove to be a detour from Welles’ Hollywood career from which he would never recover. Leaving the editing of the troubled The Magnificent Ambersons to Robert Wise, Welles ended up spending six months in South America, shooting a film about the real Rio that rocked the powers-that-be back home when it became clear he intended to show slum-dwellers as well as interracial couples doing the samba. Fueled by booze, amphetamines and chorus girls, Welles shot roll after roll of film, ultimately going from being celebrated to being vilified by the Brazilians when a local folk hero drowned during the shooting. This South American sojourn takes up nearly a third of the book and is relayed in stunning detail–perhaps excessive detail at times, but fascinating nonetheless. The remaining chapters chart Welles’ checkered career as an actor-for-hire, radio personality, magician, political speechmaker and substitute radio host for Jack Benny. Interspersed are film projects that never come to fruition (War and Peace) and those that do (Macbeth, The Lady from Shanghai), but which never reach the artistic high watermark of Citizen Kane. Throw into the mix a colorful personal life that included a tempestuous marriage to Rita Hayworth, a close relationship with Roosevelt’s vice-president, Henry Wallace, and lunches with Bertolt Brecht, and you have a portrait of a man as unique and unforgettable as Charles Foster Kane himself.
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I’ll Be In My Trailer:
The Creative Wars
Between Directors
and Actors
(Michael Wiese Productions, 217 pages, $26.95)
By John Badham and Craig Modderno
he love-hate relationship between directors and actors is entertainingly dissected by veteran director John Badham and industry journalist Craig Modderno in this kiss-and-tell primer from the directing frontlines. What does a director do when he has a crew of 60 standing around at midnight in below zero weather on New York’s Verrazano Bridge and the film’s 22-year-old star won’t come out of his trailer? Badham, who experienced that dilemma on his second film, Saturday Night Fever with John Travolta, has practical tips for this dreaded scenario and many others. Enlivened by interviews with over 40 directors and actors who aren’t afraid to name names and tell what bugs them–or inspires them–the book will be especially useful to novice filmmakers. Though Alfred Hitchcock famously stated that actors should be “treated like cattle,” Badham and Modderno advocate a more humane approach. In fact, a deep respect for the art and craft of acting and those who practice it imbues the book. Chastising directors for rudeness during auditions and aloofness on the set, the authors are not afraid, with tongue firmly in cheek, to title one of their chapters, “Are Actors Nuts?” and then proceed to cite various examples of behavior that answers the question affirmatively. At the same time, directors come under fire for their own nutty or, at the very least, obsessive behavior. Working with a young director who wanted to do take after take despite pronouncing what he already had as “perfect,” actor Clint Eastwood, known for running a fast moving set himself, walked away from the director mid-sentence saying, “Kid, perfect is as good as I get.” In the power play between actor and director, it seems one word can tip the balance or one ill-advised decision can have dire consequences. For instance, the authors have some succinct advice for those directors thinking of engaging in “intimate relations” with their actors: “why not drink Drano instead?”
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I Wake Up Screening:
What to Do Once You’ve
Made That Movie
(Watson-Guptill Publications, 218 pages, $18.95)
By John Anderson and Laura Kim
aking a film is only half the battle. Getting it seen is the other half. For directors of independent films that battle is uniquely challenging. Ideally, they must generate buzz by getting their film into one of a select handful of film festivals like Sundance or Toronto and then successfully navigate their way through the acquisitions minefield. The goal: to attract a major distributor and become the next crossover hit like Napoleon Dynamite or the next Oscar winner like Boys Don’t Cry. Authors John Anderson, film critic for Newsday, and Laura Kim, executive vice president of marketing and publicity for Warner Independent Pictures, know the ropes of this world and throw a lifeline to young filmmakers. After years of observing what works and what doesn’t in the indie arena and seeing some good films torpedoed by bad positioning in the marketplace, Anderson and Kim illuminate this essential, but often neglected, part of the filmmaking process–sales. The writers introduce the key players, who share their experiences throughout the book. Indie godfather Ted Hope, producer of over 50 films, including Friends With Money, In The Bedroom and American Splendor, talks about guiding actor Ed Burns’ directorial debut, Brothers McMullen, from a lengthy film that played like a melodrama, to a more comedic Sundance hit and one of the most commercially successful independent films ever released. Part of his strategy included orchestrating a ‘technical difficulty’ during an early screening of the film, so he only had to show the buyers in the audience the first, strongest 20 minutes of the film, thereby whetting their appetite and setting the table for a Sundance debut that played like gangbusters. Jeff Dowd, a consultant to indie filmmakers and a producer’s rep, talks about enticing journalists to come see a film at the Toronto Festival by throwing an all-you-can-eat lobster party–the director’s father was in the lobster business. Though independent films are now big business and serve as the launching ground for studio filmmakers such as Christopher Nolan (Batman Begins) and Bryan Singer (Superman Returns), there’s still a bit of crazy, shoot-from-the-hip attitude that goes into creating that success, as this book knowingly demonstrates. |
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Movie Money: Understanding Hollywood’s (Creative) Accounting Practices
Second Edition
(Silman-James Press, 297 pages, $22.95)
By Bill Daniels, David Leedy and Steven D. Sills
f, as the saying goes, knowledge is power, then every above-the-line player in Hollywood looking to gain the upper hand in deal making ought to dip into this book. Not that the book’s contents–like the studio accounting practices it depicts–will be fully understandable to anyone who’s not a CPA. But even a little knowledge can be empowering. Here you will learn the subtle differences between gross after cash breakeven, post-actual breakeven gross and post-rolling ABE gross. Whoa…who knew? (As for net participation, what Eddie Murphy once chidingly called ‘monkey points’ because only a monkey would want them, there’s no sense even worrying about it.) The book is written by a trio of finance specialists who have spent their careers wading through the morass of industry accounting–Bill Daniels (a lawyer who represents creative talent), David Leedy (a former studio controller and CPA/consultant for creative talent) and Steven D. Sills (an attorney and CPA who specializes in profit participation audits). How many money guys does it take to screw in a light bulb and shine it on the Byzantine formulas by which artists get paid in this town? In this case, three. Even if you failed freshman math and go bleary-eyed at the sight of a profit participation statement, some of the facts and definitions will sink in and you’ll be able to run more effective interference for yourself on the negotiation playing field. However, if you prefer to let your agent and business manager carry the ball for you 100 percent of the way, don’t bother. For some, ignorance indeed can be bliss. |
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